The Washington freshmen’s challenge to the varsity

The Washington freshmen’s challenge to the varsity began as an impulsive race home and became a revealing test of Washington’s crews. After hours on the water, the younger, less experienced rowers held level with the first varsity boat, then took a quarter-length lead. The varsity recovered only by sprinting over the final thirty seconds, leaving Al Ulbrickson with an unexpected measure of the two crews’ condition.

Background: An Unsettled Season

The contest came during a difficult winter of training. As soggy January gave way to a blustery February, Ulbrickson was trying to settle on a first junior varsity and first varsity for races against California in April and eastern schools in June. He was dissatisfied particularly with the varsity. He regularly recorded private assessments in a logbook after workouts, where his complaints about the weather gave way to sharper judgments of the older rowers: there were, he wrote, “too many TOLO dates,” “too many gripers,” and “not enough pepper.”

The freshman program was under pressure too. Boys who had endured bitter October and November workouts were leaving; four boatloads had dwindled to three, and by the end of the month Tom Bolles sometimes struggled to fill the third boat. The boys in Joe Rantz’s boat stayed, but their early camaraderie gave way to anxiety, self-doubt, and bickering as Bolles reconsidered who would remain in the lineup. Against that backdrop, the freshmen’s strength on the water was more than a promising result: it came from a group that had survived attrition while its coach continued to test its members.

The Race Back to the Shell House

On February 16, Ulbrickson was returning to the shell house when the first varsity boat fell in alongside Bolles’s first freshman boat. The crews were still two miles from home when, on impulse, they began racing. At first they stayed even, rowing at the same stroke count. Ulbrickson knew Bolles had been working the freshmen hard, but both crews had already been rowing for hours. He expected the younger and less experienced boys to tire.

They did not. Half a mile from the shell house, the freshmen pulled ahead and opened a quarter-length lead. The varsity coxswain, Harvey Love, called urgently for a higher stroke rate. The older crew poured on its effort for the last thirty seconds and drew level just as both boats reached the floating dock. The freshmen did not finish ahead, but they had made the varsity spend its final reserves simply to match them.

What Ulbrickson Saw

The result mattered because it contradicted the expectation that experience and age would tell over a long workout. The freshmen had not merely kept pace at the outset: after both crews had spent hours rowing, they were the boat that accelerated and briefly took the lead. The varsity’s response showed that it could find another effort, but only after Love demanded a higher rate and the crew sprinted to the finish.

That night Ulbrickson reduced the outcome to a terse entry in his logbook: “First real work the varsity has done.” The remark turned the race into a judgment on the season as well as on one finish. The freshmen had supplied the evidence he had been unable to find among the older rowers: a sustained competitive challenge that made the varsity answer with genuine effort.

Significance in Western Rowing

The internal contest unfolded within a sport whose public standing was changing. In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate crew drew major crowds and extensive press coverage, while the traditional center of American rowing remained in the East. On the West Coast, Washington and California had built a heated rivalry and attracted tens of thousands to their annual April regattas, but their programs still competed for recognition against eastern institutions with deeper prestige.

Washington’s own earlier history showed both the difficulty and the possibility of changing that balance. When Hiram Conibear first took a Washington varsity crew east to the Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta at Poughkeepsie in 1913, the team finished third and startled eastern observers. A decade later, Washington won the 1923 regatta for the West’s first victory there. The February race did not decide a championship, but its reversal of the expected hierarchy—from accomplished varsity to hard-pressed senior boat, from novice crew to pursuer—made it a consequential test of Washington’s strength as the spring races approached.